For Volunteer Firefighters, Status Shift Can Be Bruising

John Garner has been a firefighter for 25 years. That’s a quarter-century of missed birthday parties, interrupted Christmas dinners and saved lives.

But “Big John,” as the men at Tustin’s Station 21 call him, is hanging up his boots and putting down his helmet for good.

Garner’s not retiring. He’s only 49, and he was never a full-time career firefighter to begin with. He was part of a semi-volunteer system that until now has provided nearly half the bodies for the sprawling Orange County Fire Authority. Under what it dubbed the paid-call system, the Fire Authority paid about 600 firefighters $8 per hour of firefighting, with no pensions and minuscule health benefits. The authority also employs more than 700 full-time firefighters.

Fire officials, citing a federal court case in New Jersey and U.S. labor law defining under what circumstances volunteers can be paid, have announced that as of Jan. 1, they have terminated the paid-call system.

Firefighters were notified that they could apply to join a new “reserve” backup system that the authority and union officials say will return the program to its volunteer roots--and pay them even less. Rather than $8 an hour, they will receive $5 per call, with more if they work a longer day. Rather than having ranks and badges, they will all be called reserve officers.

Many are going along with the new plan--82% of the 583 paid-call firefighters have signed up for the reserve program. But others, feelings bruised, are quitting.

“I’ve shed some tears, I don’t mind telling you,” said Garner, a soft-spoken man who wears his captain’s laurels on his uniform proudly. “I was just shocked, after 25 years, all of a sudden to get a letter in the mail saying, ‘We don’t want you anymore.’ I just wasn’t ready for that. The fire department has always been a family to me. It was devastating. It really, really hurts.”

Fire Authority officials insist they made the changes so that community-minded volunteers could continue to serve, and to protect themselves from legal action.

“When we lose somebody like John Garner, we’ve lost one of us. . . . We want the John Garners of the world to continue to contribute,” authority spokesman Scott Brown said. “If we did not make this change, that might not have been possible.”

Volunteer firefighters have been around longer than the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin set up the first company in Philadelphia in 1736. And who hasn’t heard of “bucket brigades,” in which neighbors passed buckets of water to douse flames?

But there is a new kind of battle, largely unseen by the public, being fought in parts of the United States and Canada as this century closes. As once-rural communities are engulfed by highly urbanized sprawl, full-time firefighters and volunteer and paid-call fire companies are at each other’s throats in some places.

And court cases and union grievances are establishing precedents that could sharply restructure the way the nation’s firefighters operate.

“The writing’s on the wall in terms of attrition, if nothing else, when it comes to volunteers,” said Battalion Chief Steve Strawderman of Prince William County, Va., outside Washington, D.C.

Fewer Volunteers

The system of paying standby firefighters per call came about because of declining numbers of volunteers. As residents added hours-long commutes to their workday, the perks offered to volunteers increased: full pensions in New York state and elsewhere on the East Coast, workers’ compensation and car registration discounts in Virginia.

In Florida, New Jersey, California and elsewhere there are fees paid for each hour spent responding to a fire or other emergency. Authorities are careful not to label these “wages,” but many argue that’s what they are, and that’s where the potential legal dilemma lies.

Some representatives of full-time firefighters say volunteer and paid-call firefighters are poorly trained, take longer to respond to fires--if they respond at all--and endanger both the public and career firefighters even if they save money.

“The bottom line is, you have volunteers operating with far less training in these combination departments. . . . It jeopardizes lives and property, both of fellow firefighters and residents,” said George Burke, spokesman for the International Assn. of Fire Fighters in Washington, D.C., which represents 225,000 full-time career firefighters in the U.S. and Canada. “It’s all fine and dandy to have firefighters who are your neighbors fighting your fire, but if you don’t have 12 to 15 people on a crew there in five minutes, your house burns down.”

Paid-call and other volunteer firefighters counter that for decades, full-timers and volunteers worked side by side with no problems. Some say the career firefighters are overpaid and exaggerate the difficulty of the job, preferring to see local taxes skyrocket to pay their own salaries rather than allow community-minded volunteers to help out.

Added to the mix is the lack of job openings for full-time firefighters. When the Los Angeles Department of Fire and Rescue recently advertised for 500 openings during the next five years, 12,000 applicants responded.

It’s a wrenching debate in some places. Firefighters in Tustin who have battled blazes together for years are no longer talking. There have been fistfights there and in Buena Park that resulted in full-time firefighters being suspended.

Dan York, a paid-call firefighter along with Garner at Tustin’s Station 21, said he would love to sign up as a reserve, “but I tell you, working conditions personally for me at the fire station mean I can’t justify it to my wife and my family anymore. It’s not the money, it’s the slamming of the doors, not talking. . . . I tried to confront them on it, and they say, ‘Hey, don’t take it personally, you’re a really nice person, but c’mon, let’s face facts, you’re undertrained, we’re an urban fire department.’ ”

Joe Kerr, president of Orange County’s fire union, countered: “I don’t have anything against any of the individuals; they are trying to serve their communities. But this is a system that grew legs, that went places it never should have gone. It’s a cheap man’s fire protection system.”

Kerr said that in Orange County, full-time firefighters receive 680 hours of training, while paid-call firefighters receive 160 hours.

But lifelong volunteers say it makes no sense to lose decades of hands-on experience.

“I worry about the daily coverage, but I also worry about ‘the big one,’ ” said Bruce Newel, longtime paid-call captain of Station 16 in Orange County’s remote Modjeska Canyon, who has fought scores of wildfires and performed arduous rescues in Cleveland National Forest.

“It’s true that we can’t make every call in the daytime anymore. . . . But isn’t it better to have ill-trained people ready to respond when nobody else will be able to if and when there is a real big earthquake, for instance?”

Nationwide Debate

Other communities across North America have gone through a similar debate and in some cases protracted lawsuits about the proper or improper use of volunteers.

In Montgomery County, Md., career firefighters have twice had referendums placed on the ballot asking voters to switch control of county firefighting operations to them, not 19 volunteer fire corporations. Both referendums failed. Professional firefighters in Prince William County, Va., have charged that preventable deaths occurred because of volunteer stations that claimed they were fully staffed but did not respond to late-night and early-morning calls.

But Orange County could emerge as the largest testing ground yet, with unions also entering the debate.

The Teamsters have filed court papers challenging the new system and plan to seek the right to represent volunteer firefighters here.

On the other side, Local 3631 of the International Assn. of Fire Fighters has filed a grievance with the county, claiming that expansion of the paid-call system is illegal.

Orange County proposed its changes after a similar situation unfolded in Cherry Hill, N.J., a suburb of Philadelphia.

The township was paying its volunteers up to $9 an hour. Advised by the U.S. Department of Labor that it was violating the Fair Labor Standards Act, which prohibits paying a salary to someone volunteering time for civic or charitable purposes, the fire department reorganized and made them volunteers without pay. The angry paid-call firefighters sued, and won. A federal judge declared they were employees, and the township was ordered to pay nearly $250,000 in combined back wages and overtime pay to the 20 firefighters who had sued.

Alarmed, the attorney for the Joint Powers Authority that oversees the Orange County Fire Authority warned that the county could also be held liable and advised eliminating the program altogether, then implementing a new plan.

With tensions between union and paid-call firefighters heating up, the Orange County fire chief notified both sides of the wholesale change just hours before the news media were notified. Both sides were caught by surprise.

“I never wanted to be anything else,” said Newel, in remote Modjeska Canyon. He thinks the elimination of titles and ranks is silly, but “it’s never been about money for me.”

There are others who feel that the new program is not only an insult but could compromise safety.

Rather than switch to the reserve system, Garner, who has considered himself nothing but a volunteer all along, will “leave with my head held high. I can see their new system is not going to work, and I’m not going to be part of it.”

Garner, who says he makes an estimated $50 per hour from his automobile repair service, insists it’s not the money for him either, it’s the abrupt way he was notified.

But for college students, other small-business owners and, most important, aspiring professional firefighters, the paid-call system has amounted to at least a part-time job.

Dave Bowden, 20, has worked with Garner in Station 21 for six months. Eager to snare a full-time career firefighting position somewhere, Bowden has lived with his parents and scraped by on the $8 an hour, earning about $10,000 last year.

Now Bowden frets that he will have to find a different type of job that will cut into his firefighting time.

Garner says it’s a shame.

“It’s not just us losing out,” he said. “The residents and everyone else is losing out too.”